Differences between number of ratings and number of people that added it gives problems?

[Renske]

Sometimes I find some problems with merging of separating, that an edition is merged into a different edition than I expected. Or I try to separate an edition and get an unexpected 'you can't separate the most popular edition' message. (While there is a difference in the numbers, not with editions that are added the same amount.)

It happens not often compared to the number of merges I do, but as I'm a super-librarian, there could be a large number of reviews be involved.

Could it be that this is caused that one edition is added more times but an other edition has more ratings?
What I remember it did happen each time with books that are not yet published or very recently published, so with rather low numbers of ratings compared to the number of people that have added it.

Or is this just an error that unfortunately happens sometimes?

If it is not an error, how can we be sure into which edition something will be merged? For the all editions page I use always the 'number ratings' for sort by.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Renske wrote: "If it is not an error, how can we be sure into which edition something will be merged?"

The only sure way is to separate out just the two editions you want to merge.

[Z-squared]

I've noticed problems on the 'separate tool' page, too. The book that is clearly primary (by many, many reviews/shelvings/any metric you'd like) should be the primary but actually appears as one of the secondary editions, and one of the editions I actually WANT to separate is often the 'primary' on that page. The only workaround I've found is to manually separate each edition from the combine page, then combine them.

The 'you can't separate the most popular edition' message, as Renske has pointed out, often comes up when trying to separate so-called secondary editions, and I can counter-intuitively get around that by clicking 'separate' on the so-called most popular edition.

If I didn't have workarounds, I probably would have asked about this before, but since I could jury-rig it, I've never bothered. Thought I'd add my two cents now, though. I've definitely become more vigilant about separating out editions to be merged for these very reasons.